I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khill@forbes.com. PGP key here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.
I have few illusions about privacy -- feel free to follow me on Twitter: kashhill, subscribe to me on Facebook, Circle me on Google+, or use Google Maps to figure out where the Forbes San Francisco bureau is, and come a-knockin'.

I assume you’ve heard of Spokeo, or “Spookeo,” depending on how you feel about a site that offers up profiles of people including their names, addresses, family members, interests, ethnicity, age of first kiss, pet peeves and boxer/brief preferences. The site has been around for years but has been getting a lot of attention lately thanks in part to their recently getting banged by Boing Boing. (The site’s been around since at least 2007, yet every time someone writes about it, they refer to it as a “new” information-aggregation site.)

The site simply crawls the Web and publicly-available databases, aggregating the information in one easy-to-find spot. Being profiled naturally makes people nervous, especially when they can actually see what’s known about them (as opposed to all those profiles out there on you — compiled by your credit card companies, grocery stores, and infatuated love interests — that you can’t see). “We recognize that for some users it can be a startling experience to encounter a block of personalized information which they may otherwise be unaware exists – particularly when the information is of a type they may perceive as ‘private,’” wrote Spokeo in a recent blog post addressing this new wave of concerns. That’s a phrasing some may perceive as “skeptical.”

I often hear from people encouraging me to write about the site. Sounds like Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is getting similar requests. “Data laws are so lax in the U.S. that companies can do this sort of thing quite legally,” he wrote yesterday in a post titled, “There’s Absolutely Nothing You Can Do About Spokeo, So Stop Whining.” (Of course, with Congress getting all hot and heavy over privacy, those lax laws could change.)

That offer has led to another FTC complaint, and this one could get the site in trouble if true. Multiple users say that they have asked to have their profiles removed and that they have come back. Zombie profiles that refuse to die could get Spokeo into unfair and deceptive business practices territory. The blogger who goes by Dissent Doe at PogoWasRight filed an FTC complaint this week, after profiles of her and her family that she had previously removed came back to life on the site. I reached out to Spokeo to ask why these profiles refuse to die…

A Spokeo spokesperson says: “When you choose to opt out, we place a permanent flag on your listing so that it does not ever reappear on Spokeo.com. We are constantly receiving new and updated listings, and we try very hard to match these new listings to the existing ones and preserve your privacy preference. However, a computer cannot know the difference between “John Smith at 1234 Nowhere Street” and “John Smith at 5678 Somewhere Avenue”, though you may know that you moved. So if a new listing contains your new address, or if there are significant typos which prevent our computers from matching an existing listing, you will see a new listing for your name. We are constantly improving our matching algorithms in order to maintain your privacy. Spokeo guarantees that our opt out policy is among the best on the Internet.”

A Spokeo profile based on my college address

I checked in with Dissent Doe, and she says the profiles that reappeared contained the exact same names and same addresses. We’ll see what the FTC decides to do.

Meanwhile, Spokeo has taken a small inadvertent step to protect privacy. Much of the site’s content recently moved behind a pay wall. Now you have to shell out a few dollars for a really detailed report on someone. (A three-month membership is $14.85.)

And not everyone is up in arms about it. The Better Business Bureau recently rushed to the company’s defense on its blog. Radio personality Dale Jackson at the Attack Machine paid up to get his profile, and was unimpressed by what the site knew about him, determining that “Spokeo is not raping errybody’s privacy out der…” This was because of all the things that the site got wrong about him, listing him incorrectly as a clerical/service worker, for example.

Of course, those kinds of inaccuracies in an otherwise fairly accurate profile are part of what spooks many of the people who come to the site. If you’re going to create an intrusive profile, at least make sure to get the details right.

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